A Partition of Unity construction of the stabilization function in Nitsche’s method for variational problems

Abstract

In this paper we develop a partition-of-unity construction of the stabilization function required in Nitsche’s method, which can be seen as a generalization of the element-wise construction that is widely used in finite element methods. This allows for the use of Nitsche’s method within the Partition of Unity Method with a stabilization function that is not simply a constant over the whole boundary. In addition to that, we introduce a patch-aggregation approach designed to avoid arbitrarily large values of the stabilization function and the associated ill-conditioned systems and deteriorated convergence rates. We present numerical results to validate the proposed methods, covering Dirichlet boundary conditions, interface constraints and higher-order problems. These results clearly show that our approach leads to optimal convergence rates.